When I watched Oscar-winning film The
Pianist I had three distinct, uneasy reactions. I was not particularly
impressed by the film, from a purely artistic angle; I was horrified
by the films depiction of the dehumanization of Polish Jews and
the impunity of the German occupiers; and I could not help but compare
the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israels much more ominous wall caging
3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling
prisons.

In the film, when
German soldiers forced Jewish musicians to play for them at a checkpoint,
I thought to myself: thats one thing Israeli soldiers have
not yet done to Palestinians. I spoke too soon, it seems. Israels
leading newspaper Haaretz reported last week that an Israeli human
rights organization monitoring a daunting military roadblock near Nablus
was able to videotape Israeli soldiers forcing a Palestinian violinist
to play for them. The same organization confirmed that similar abuse
had taken place months ago at another checkpoint near Jerusalem.

In typical Israeli
whitewashing, the incident was dismissed by an army spokesperson as
little more that insensitivity, with no malicious intent
to humiliate the Palestinians involved. And of course the usual mantra
about soldiers having to contend with a complex and dangerous
reality was again served as a ready, one-size-fits-all excuse.
I wonder whether the same would be said or accepted in describing the
original Nazi practice at the Warsaw ghetto gates in the 1940s.

Regrettably, the
analogy between the two illegal occupations does not stop here. Many
of the methods of collective and individual punishment meted
out to Palestinian civilians at the hands of young, racist, often sadistic
and ever impervious Israeli soldiers at the hundreds of checkpoints
littering the occupied Palestinian territories are reminiscent of common
Nazi practices against the Jews. Following a visit to the occupied Palestinian
territories in 2003, Oona King, a Jewish member of the British parliament
attested to this, writing: The original founders of the Jewish
state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping
the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in
a hell similar in its nature - though not its extent - to the Warsaw
ghetto.

Even Tommy Lapid,
Israels justice minister and a Holocaust survivor himself, stirred
a political storm last year when he told Israel radio that a picture
of an elderly Palestinian woman searching in the debris for her medication
had reminded him of his grandmother who died at Auschwitz. Furthermore,
he commented on his armys wanton and indiscriminate destruction
of Palestinian homes, businesses and farms in Gaza at the time, saying:
[I]f we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United
Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague.

Some of the war
crimes that concern people like Lapid have been lately revealed in eyewitness
accounts given by former soldiers, who could no longer reconcile whatever
moral values they held with their complicity in the daily humiliation,
abuse and physical harm of innocent civilians. Such crimes have become
normalized in their minds as acceptable, even necessary, acts of disciplining
the untamed natives, as a measure to maintain security.

According to a recent
report in the Israeli media, an army commander was accused of gratuitously
beating up Palestinians at the notorious Hawwara checkpoint. Ironically,
the most damning evidence presented against him was a videotape filmed
by the armys education branch. In that particular episode, the
senior officer at that roadblock, knowing that an army film crew was
located nearby, and without any provocation, beat a Palestinian flanked
by his wife and children, punching him in the face, and even
kicked[him] in the lower part of his body, the report said.

A recent exhibit
titled Breaking the Silence, organized in Tel Aviv by a
number of conscientious Israeli soldiers who served in occupied Hebron,
exposed in photographs and objects more serious belligerence towards
defenseless Palestinians. Inspired by Jewish settlers graffiti
that included: Arabs to the gas chambers; Arabs =
an inferior race; Spill Arab blood; and, of course,
the ever so popular Death to the Arabs, soldiers used a
myriad of methods to make the lives of average Palestinians intolerable.
One photograph showed a bumper sticker on a passing car, perhaps explaining
the ultimate goal of such abuse: Religious penitence provides
strength to expel the Arabs. The exhibits main curator described
a particularly shocking policy of randomly spraying crowded Palestinian
residential neighborhoods, like Abu Sneina, from heavy machine guns
and grenade launchers for hours on end in response to any minor shooting
of a few bullets from any house in the neighborhood on the Jewish colonies
inside the city.

The Hebron horrors
pale, however, in comparison to what Israeli army units have done in
Gaza. In an unnerving interview with Haaretz in November last
year, for instance, Liran Ron Furer, a staff sergeant (res.) in the
Israeli army and graduate of an arts school, described the gradual transformation
of every soldier to an animal when staffing a roadblock,
irrespective of whatever values he may bring with him from home. From
his perspective, those soldiers get infected with what he calls checkpoint
syndrome, a glaring symptom of which is acting violently towards
Palestinians in the most primal and impulsive manner, without
fear of punishment . At the checkpoint, he explains,
young people have the chance to be masters and using force and
violence becomes legitimate .

Furer cites how
his colleagues degraded and mercilessly beat a Palestinian dwarf just
for fun; how they had a souvenir picture taken with bloodied,
bound civilians whom theyd thrashed; how one soldier pissed on
the head of a Palestinian man because the latter had the nerve
to smile at a soldier; how another Palestinian was forced to stand
on four legs and bark like a dog; and how yet another soldier asked
Palestinians for cigarettes and when they refused broke someones
hand and slashed their tires.

The most chilling
of all the incidents was his own personal confession. I ran toward
[a group of Palestinians] and punched an Arab right in the face,
he admitted. Blood was trickling from his lip onto his chin. I
led him up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his knees banged against
the trunk and he landed inside. He then goes on to describe in
gruesome details how he and his comrades stepped on the tightly handcuffed
captive, dubbed the Arab; how they hit him until he
was bleeding and making a kind of puddle of blood and saliva;
how he grabbed him by the hair and turned his head to the side,
until he cried aloud, and how the soldiers then stepped harder
and harder on his back, to make him stop crying.

Furer then reveals
that the company commander cheered them on: Good work, tigers.
And after they took their prey to their camp, the abuse continued in
different forms. All the other soldiers were waiting there to
see what [my emphasis] we'd caught. When we came in with the Jeep, they
whistled and applauded wildly. One of the soldiers, Furer said,
went up to him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled
over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him
really hard in the ass and he flew forward just as I'd expected. They
shouted and laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a
16-year-old mentally retarded boy.

As savage as it
is, checkpoint abuse is not unique in any sense. It fits perfectly well
into the general picture of viewing the Palestinians as relative humans
who are not entitled to the dignity and respect that full humans deserve.
At the height of Israels massive reoccupation of Palestinian cities
in 2002, for example, soldiers used their knives to engrave the star
of David on the arms of a number of detained Palestinian men and teenage
boys. The haunting pictures of the victims were first shown on Arab
satellite TV channels and eventually exposed on the internet.

In the same year,
at al-Amari refugee camp, during a mass roundup of Palestinian males,
teenagers and elderly included, Israeli troops inscribed identification
numbers on the foreheads and forearms of Palestinian detainees
awaiting interrogation. The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat
compared the act to well known Nazi practices at concentration camps.
Tommy Lapid was incensed, saying: "As a refugee from the Holocaust
I find such an act insufferable. Nonetheless, Raanan Gissin, a
spokesman for Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, was worried only
about Israels image being tarnished: clearly it conflicts
with the desire to convey a public relations message, he told
Israel Army Radio. Parroting that line, the mainstream media in Israel,
too, were far too concerned about the public relations disaster
to express any abhorrence or protestation at the immorality of the act
and the irony of it all.

Yoram Peri, a professor
of politics and media at Tel Aviv University, sees PR as a fundamental
issue in Israeli life. We do not think we do anything wrong,
he clarifies in an interview with the Guardian, but we think we
explain ourselves badly and that the international media is anti-Semitic.
Obsessed with how Israel is seen rather than with what it actually does,
Israelis, according to Peri, are mostly worried that we do not
explain ourselves well. When we discuss the horrible things that happen
in the West Bank, we don't talk about the issue but about how it will
be seen.

Recognizing this
prevailing cynicism, apathy and acquiescence among the majority of Israelis
in the criminal oppression of the Palestinians, former Knesset member
Shulamit Aloni pronounced in a recent interview with the Irish publication
the Handstand that gross insensitivity was threatening a
moral disintegration of Israeli society. Referring to the Germans during
the Nazi rule, she added, I am beginning to understand why a whole
nation was able to say: We did not know.

I wonder when the
time will come when a glamorous, award-winning director braves predictable
intellectual terror and intimidation tactics to expose the venomous
Israeli cocktail of racism and impunity by making a Palestinian version
of The Pianist.

Omar Barghouti
is an independent political analyst based in Palestine.